Jtm-pnw-session-northwest-commons
JTMPNW ONGOING (COLLABORATORY) & CIVIC COMMUNICATIONS COMMONS
Convenors: Susan Gleason, John Hamer, Mike Fancher
Participants: Anne Stadler, John Spady, Richard VanderKnyff, Sheri Herndon, Jonathan Lawson, David Beers, Bart Preecs, Sally James, Yuko Kodama, Jeff Vander Klute, Sam Kimball, and others.
DEFINING THE COLLABORATORY AND THE CIVIC COMMONS
Anne Stadler, re JTMPNW Collaboratory: JTMPNW Collaboratory: A learning lab for entrepreneurial projects and nourishing connections that meets quarterly face to face and online all the time!
John Spady, re Civic Commons: Civic Commons:
* An extension of the Town Forum / Town Hall paradigm * Safe space that allows us to meet physically and virtually, and enables a great diversity of voices to be heard on a variety of civic issues * With civic space, or civic spectrum, we can tune in to what we want to hear or follow — we wouldn't be able to hear or follow it all.
Example of the Civic Commons in practice:
* King County-wide Community Forums — a first step in this model that's already in the works * The familiar town hall model of one big meeting is distributed throughout the county to small meetings held in homes * Meeting hosts distribute a post-event survey; survey results are tabulated (and later aggregated?) * This model scales very easily
HOW THE JTMPNW COLLABORATORY AND CIVIC COMMONS IDEA RELATE TO EACH OTHER
Commons Idea – eperiment for civic engagement space
Players: government, nonprofit
Safe place to discuss civic issues
Curated civic spae – civic/public
People who are caring about the civic space
Anne: The collaboratory – a juicy place where people are exploring the possibilities — the civic space that welcomes the collaboratory’s experiments is the commons
News & Info ecosystem – gaps, needs, resources
Info Commons could be pilot project of JTMPNW
Anne: Community forums are aspect of commons. Many more assests can be explored including Health Communities Report from Seattel Foundaton There’s a larger plate of possibilities
John: Concentric circles. Collaboratory is nurturing many different speices, projects
MAPPING EXISTING RESOURCES THAT RELATE TO THESE PROJECTS
* The Hub - Conversations in Seattle inspired by Jonathan Robinson's work out of England. Contact: Sheri Herndon
* W2 Space (Vancouver, BC) - 8,000 sq ft. community space that community radio stations and other media and culture producers are moving into for the 2010 Olympics and 30 yrs beyond. Contact:
* Town Hall Seattle - popular nonprofit event space for 800 attendees; host to major lecture and culture events year-round. Contact: Weir Harman
* Center for Communication & Civic Engagement at University of Washington. Contact: Lance Bennett
Readings:
* Elinor Ostrom, 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics winner, Economies of the Commons
COMMENTS FROM SESSION PARTICIPANTS
Anne Stadler (who provided definitions for the ongoing Collaboratory): Thanks all of you! I look forward to the notes and to the rich soil we are cultivating!
